Part 29

“Unable to rid myself of you, ever hearing your song humming in my head, ever seeing your feet dancing upon my breviary, ever feeling in the night of dreams your form glide over my flesh, I wished to see you again, to touch you, to know who you were, to see if I should find you indeed like the ideal image I had kept of you, to shatter perchance my dream with reality. At all events, I hoped that a new impression would efface the first, and the first had become insupportable to me. I sought you. I saw you again. Woe is me! When I had seen you twice, I wished to see you a thousand times, I wished to see you always. Then—how to check one’s self upon that slope of hell?—then I belonged no more to myself. The other end of the thread which the demon had fastened to my wings, he had knotted to your foot. I became vague and wandering like you. I waited for you under the porches, I watched for you at the street corners, I spied you from the top of my tower. Each evening I returned into myself more charmed, more despairing, more bewitched, more lost!

“I had learned who you were, Egyptian, Bohemian, gipsy, zingara—how doubt the magic? Listen. I hoped that a trial would rid me of the charm. A sorceress had bewitched Bruno d’Ast, he had her burned and was cured. I knew it. I wished to try the remedy. I tried first to have you forbidden the parvis of Notre-Dame, hoping to forget you if you came no more. You heeded it not. You returned. Then came to me the idea of carrying you off. One night I attempted it. We were two. We already held you, when that wretched officer appeared. He delivered you. Thus he began your misfortune, mine, and his own. At length, knowing no longer what to do nor whither to turn, I denounced you to the official. I thought I should be cured, like Bruno d’Ast. I thought also, confusedly, that a trial would deliver you to me, that in a prison I should hold you, I should have you, that there you could not escape me, that you had possessed me long enough for me to possess you in my turn. When one does evil, one must do all the evil. It is madness to stop midway in the monstrous! The extremity of crime has its deliriums of joy. A priest and a sorceress may there melt in delights upon the truss of straw in a dungeon!

“I denounced you, then. It was then that I terrified you in our encounters. The plot I was weaving against you, the storm I was heaping above your head, escaped from me in threats and lightnings. Yet I still hesitated. My project had frightful sides which made me recoil.

“Perhaps I should have renounced it, perhaps my hideous thought would have withered in my brain without bearing its fruit. I believed it would always depend upon me to follow or break off this suit. But every evil thought is inexorable and will become a fact; but there where I deemed myself all-powerful, fate was stronger than I. Alas! alas! it is she who has taken you and delivered you to the terrible wheel of the machine which I had darkly built!—Listen. I am coming to the end.

“One day—upon another bright sun—I see pass before me a man who pronounces your name and who laughs and who has lust in his eyes. Damnation! I followed him. You know the rest.”

He was silent.

The young girl could find but one word:

“Oh, my Phoebus!”

“Not that name!” said the priest, seizing her arm violently. “Pronounce not that name! Oh, wretched that we are, it is that name which has undone us! Or rather we have all undone one another by the inexplicable play of fate! You suffer, do you not? you are cold, the night blinds you, the dungeon wraps you round, but perhaps you still have some light within you, were it only your childish love for that empty man who played with your heart! While I, I bear the dungeon within me, within me is winter, ice, despair, I have night in my soul. Know you all I have suffered? I was present at your trial. I sat upon the bench of the official. Yes, beneath one of those priestly hoods there were the contortions of a damned soul. When you were brought in, I was there; when you were questioned, I was there.—Den of wolves!—It was my crime, it was my gibbet that I saw slowly rising upon your brow. At each witness, at each proof, at each plea, I was there; I could count each of your steps in the sorrowful way; I was there again when that fierce beast—Oh! I had not foreseen the torture!—Listen. I followed you into the chamber of pain. I saw you undressed and handled half-naked by the infamous hands of the tormentor. I saw your foot, that foot on which I would have given an empire to press one kiss and die, that foot beneath which I should have felt such delight in crushing my head, I saw it enclosed in the horrible boot which makes of a living being’s limbs a bloody mire. Oh, wretched one! while I beheld that, I had beneath my surplice a poniard with which I gashed my breast. At the cry you uttered, I plunged it into my flesh; at a second cry, it entered my heart! See. I think it still bleeds.”

He opened his cassock. His breast was indeed torn as by a tiger’s claw, and he had at his side a wound wide enough and ill closed.

The prisoner drew back in horror.

“Oh!” said the priest, “young girl, have pity on me! You think yourself unhappy, alas! alas! you know not what misfortune is. Oh! to love a woman! to be a priest! to be hated! to love her with all the furies of one’s soul, to feel that one would give for the least of her smiles one’s blood, one’s bowels, one’s fame, one’s salvation, immortality and eternity, this life and the other; to regret not being king, genius, emperor, archangel, god, to put beneath her feet a greater slave; to clasp her night and day in one’s dreams and thoughts; and to see her in love with a soldier’s livery! and to have to offer her only a foul priest’s cassock of which she will be afraid and sick! To be present, with one’s jealousy and one’s rage, while she lavishes upon a miserable imbecile braggart treasures of love and beauty! To see that body whose shape burns you, that breast of such sweetness, that flesh palpitate and redden beneath another’s kisses! O heaven! to love her foot, her arm, her shoulder, to muse upon her blue veins, upon her brown skin, even to writhing whole nights upon the pavement of one’s cell, and to see all the caresses one has dreamed for her end in torture! To have succeeded only in laying her upon the leather bed! Oh! these are the true pincers heated in the fire of hell! Oh! blessed is he whom they saw between two boards, and whom they tear asunder with four horses!—Know you what that torment is which they make you suffer, during the long nights, your boiling arteries, your heart that bursts, your head that breaks, your teeth that bite your hands; relentless tormentors who turn you unceasingly, as upon a burning gridiron, upon a thought of love, of jealousy and despair! Young girl, mercy! respite a moment! a little ashes upon that ember! Wipe, I beseech you, the sweat that streams in great drops from my brow! Child! torture me with one hand, but caress me with the other! Have pity, young girl! have pity on me!”

The priest rolled upon the water of the flagstone and beat his skull against the angles of the stone steps. The young girl listened to him, looked at him.

When he was silent, exhausted and panting, she repeated in a half-voice:

“Oh, my Phoebus!”

The priest dragged himself toward her upon both knees.

“I implore you,” he cried, “if you have bowels of compassion, do not repulse me! Oh! I love you! I am a wretched man! When you say that name, unhappy one, it is as if you crushed between your teeth all the fibres of my heart! Mercy! if you come from hell, I go thither with you. I have done all for that. The hell where you shall be is my paradise, your sight is more charming than that of God! Oh, say! you will not have me then? The day a woman should repulse such a love, I should have thought the mountains would move. Oh! if you would!—Oh! how happy we might be! We would flee—I would make you flee—we would go somewhere, we would seek the spot upon earth where there is most sun, most trees, most blue sky. We would love one another, we would pour our two souls one into the other, and we would have an unquenchable thirst for ourselves which we would slake together and without cease at that cup of inexhaustible love!”

She interrupted him with a terrible and ringing laugh.

“Look, father! you have blood beneath your nails!”

The priest remained some moments as if petrified, his eye fixed upon his hand.

“Well, yes!” he resumed at length with a strange gentleness, “outrage me, mock me, overwhelm me! but come, come. Make haste. It is for tomorrow, I tell you. The gibbet of the Grève, you know it? it is ever ready. It is horrible! to see you walk in that tumbril! Oh, mercy!—I never felt as now to what point I love you. Oh! follow me. You will take time to love me after I shall have saved you. You shall hate me as long as you will. But come. Tomorrow! tomorrow! the gibbet! your torment! Oh! save yourself! spare me!”

He took her arm, he was beside himself, he would have dragged her away.

She fixed upon him her steady eye.

“What has become of my Phoebus?”

“Ah!” said the priest, letting go her arm, “you are without pity!”

“What has become of Phoebus?” she repeated coldly.

“He is dead!” cried the priest.

“Dead!” said she, still icy and motionless; “then why do you speak to me of living?”

He listened not to her.

“Oh, yes,” said he, as if speaking to himself, “he must be quite dead. The blade entered very deep. I think I touched the heart with the point. Oh! I lived to the very hilt of the dagger!”

The young girl threw herself upon him like a furious tigress, and pushed him upon the steps of the stairway with a supernatural force.

“Begone, monster! begone, assassin! leave me to die! May our blood together make upon your brow an eternal stain! To be yours, priest! never! never! Nothing shall unite us, not even hell! Go, accursed! never!”

The priest had stumbled on the stair. He silently disengaged his feet from the folds of his robe, took up his lantern, and began slowly to mount the steps which led to the door; he reopened that door, and went out.

Suddenly the young girl saw his head reappear; it had a frightful expression, and he cried to her with a rattle of rage and despair:

“I tell you he is dead!”

She fell with her face to the ground; and naught was heard in the dungeon save the sigh of the drop of water which made the pool palpitate in the darkness.

V

THE MOTHER

I believe there is nothing in the world more cheerful than the thoughts which awaken in a mother’s heart at sight of her child’s little shoe. Especially if it be the holiday shoe, of Sundays, of the baptism, the shoe embroidered even beneath the sole, a shoe with which the child has not yet taken a step. That shoe has such grace and smallness, it is so impossible for it to walk, that it is for the mother as if she saw her child. She smiles at it, she kisses it, she speaks to it. She asks herself if indeed a foot can be so small; and, were the child absent, it suffices the pretty shoe to set before her eyes the sweet and fragile creature. She thinks she sees it, she sees it, whole, living, joyous, with its delicate hands, its round head, its pure lips, its serene eyes whose white is blue. If it be winter, it is there, it crawls upon the carpet, it laboriously climbs a stool, and the mother trembles lest it approach the fire. If it be summer, it drags itself in the court, in the garden, plucks the grass from between the paving-stones, naively gazes at the great dogs, the great horses, without fear, plays with the shells, with the flowers, and makes the gardener scold who finds sand in the beds and earth in the walks. All laughs, all shines, all plays around it as around him, even the breath of air and the ray of sunlight which sport in rivalry amid the wild curls of its hair. The shoe shows all this to the mother and melts her heart like fire melts wax.

But when the child is lost, those thousand images of joy, of charm, of tenderness which throng around the little shoe become so many horrible things. The pretty embroidered shoe is no longer aught but an instrument of torture which eternally crushes the mother’s heart. It is ever the same fibre that vibrates, the deepest and most sensitive fibre; but instead of an angel who caresses it, it is a demon who pinches it.

One morning, while the May sun rose in one of those dark-blue skies wherein Garofalo loves to place his descents from the cross, the recluse of the Tour-Roland heard a noise of wheels, of horses and of ironwork in the Place de Grève. She awoke little at that, tied her hair over her ears to deafen herself, and fell again to contemplating on her knees the inanimate object she had thus adored for fifteen years. This little shoe, we have already said, was for her the universe. Her thought was shut up in it, and was not to issue thence save at death. What she had cast toward heaven of bitter imprecations, of touching plaints, of prayers and sobs, concerning this charming plaything of pink satin, the dark vault of the Tour-Roland alone has known. Never has more despair been poured upon a thing more dainty and graceful.

That morning, it seemed her grief escaped more violent still than ordinary, and one heard her from without lament with a high and monotonous voice that broke the heart.

“Oh, my daughter!” said she, “my daughter! my poor dear little child! I shall then see you no more. It is then ended! It seems to me ever it happened but yesterday! My God, my God, to take her back so soon, it had been better not to give her to me. Do you not know then that our children cling to our womb, and that a mother who has lost her child believes no more in God?—Ah, wretched that I am, to have gone out that day!—Lord! Lord! to take her from me thus, you had never then looked upon me with her, when I warmed her all joyous at my fire, when she laughed at me as she nursed, when I raised her little feet upon my breast even to my lips? Oh, if you had looked upon that, my God, you would have had pity on my joy, you would not have taken from me the only love that remained in my heart! Was I then so wretched a creature, Lord, that you could not look upon me ere condemning me?—Alas! alas! there is the shoe; the foot, where is it? where is the rest? where is the child? My daughter, my daughter! what have they done with you? Lord, give her back to me. My knees have been flayed for fifteen years in praying to you, my God, is not that enough? Give her back to me, a day, an hour, a minute, one minute, Lord! and cast me afterward to the demon for eternity! Oh! if I knew where trails a hem of your robe, I would cling to it with both hands, and you must needs give me back my child! Her pretty little shoe, have you no pity for it, Lord? Can you condemn a poor mother to this torment of fifteen years? Good Virgin! good Virgin of heaven! my own child Jesus, they have taken him from me, they have stolen him, they have eaten him upon a heath, they have drunk his blood, they have chewed his bones! Good Virgin, have pity on me! My daughter! I must have my daughter! What is it to me that she be in paradise? I want not your angel, I want my child! I am a lioness, I want my lion’s whelp.—Oh! I shall writhe upon the earth, and break the stone with my brow, and I shall damn myself, and I shall curse you, Lord, if you keep my child from me! you see well my arms are all bitten, Lord! has not the good God pity?—Oh! give me but salt and black bread, so I have my daughter and she warm me like a sun! Alas! God my Lord, I am but a vile sinner, but my daughter made me pious. I was full of religion for love of her; and I saw you through her smile as through an opening of heaven.—Oh! that I might but once, yet once again, but once, shoe this little pink foot of hers, and I die, good Virgin, blessing you!—Ah! fifteen years! she would be tall now!—Unhappy child! what! is it then quite true, I shall see her no more, not even in heaven? for, I, I shall not go thither. Oh what misery! to say that there is her shoe, and that is all!”

The unhappy woman had thrown herself upon that shoe, her consolation and her despair for so many years, and her bowels were torn with sobs as on the first day. For a mother who has lost her child, it is ever the first day. That grief grows not old. The mourning weeds may wear out and whiten; the heart remains black.

At this moment, fresh and joyous voices of children passed before the cell. Whenever children struck her sight or her ear, the poor mother flung herself into the darkest corner of her sepulchre, and one would have said she sought to plunge her head into the stone that she might not hear them. This time, on the contrary, she started up as in a sudden start, and listened eagerly. One of the little boys had just said: “They are going to hang an Egyptian today.”

With the abrupt start of that spider we have seen throw itself upon a fly at the trembling of its web, she ran to her loophole, which, as we know, gave upon the Place de Grève. In truth, a ladder was reared near the permanent gibbet, and the master of the low works was busy readjusting its chains rusted by the rain. There was some people around.

The merry group of children was already far off. The sachette sought with her eyes some passer-by whom she might question. She espied, close by her lodge, a priest who made as if reading in the public breviary, but who was much less occupied with the “iron trellised lettering” than with the gibbet, toward which he cast from time to time a dark and savage glance. She recognized monsieur the archdeacon of Josas, a holy man.

“My father,” she asked, “whom are they going to hang there?”

The priest looked at her and answered not; she repeated her question. Then he said: “I know not.”

“There were children there who said it was an Egyptian,” resumed the recluse.

“I believe so,” said the priest.

Then Paquette la Chantefleurie burst into a laugh of a hyena.

“My sister,” said the archdeacon, “do you then so hate the Egyptians?”

“If I hate them?” cried the recluse; “they are strixes! child-stealers! They devoured my little girl! my child, my only child! I have no more heart. They ate it from me!”

She was frightful. The priest looked at her coldly.

“There is one above all whom I hate, and whom I have cursed,” she resumed; “it is a young one, of the age my daughter would have, had her mother not eaten my daughter from me. Each time that young viper passes before my cell, she turns my blood to storm!”

“Well! my sister, rejoice,” said the priest, glacial as a sepulchral statue; “it is that one you are going to see die.”

His head fell upon his breast, and he moved slowly away.

The recluse wrung her arms for joy.

“I had foretold her she would mount it! Thank you, priest!” she cried.

And she fell to walking with great strides before the bars of her loophole, dishevelled, her eye flaming, striking the wall with her shoulder, with the savage air of a caged she-wolf that has long been hungry and feels the hour of the meal approach.

VI

THREE MEN’S HEARTS DIFFERENTLY MADE

Phoebus, however, was not dead. Men of that sort have tough lives. When master Philippe Lheulier, extraordinary advocate to the king, had said to poor Esmeralda: “He is dying,” it was by error or by pleasantry. When the archdeacon had repeated to the condemned girl: “He is dead,” the fact is that he knew nothing of it, but that he believed it, that he counted upon it, that he doubted it not, that he hoped it well. It would have been too cruel for him to give to the woman he loved good news of his rival. Any man in his place would have done the same.

It is not that Phoebus’s wound had not been grave, but it had been less so than the archdeacon flattered himself. The master-surgeon, to whose house the watchmen had borne him in the first moment, had feared for his life for eight days, and had even told him so in Latin. However, youth had got the upper hand; and, as often happens, notwithstanding prognostics and diagnostics, nature had amused herself by saving the patient in the very face of the physician. While he still lay upon the master-surgeon’s pallet he had undergone the first examinations of Philippe Lheulier and of the official’s inquirers, which had much annoyed him. Accordingly, one fine morning, feeling better, he had left his golden spurs in payment to the apothecary, and had slipped away. This, moreover, had brought no disturbance into the conduct of the affair. The justice of that time cared very little for the clearness and cleanness of a criminal suit. Provided the accused were hanged, that was all it needed. Now, the judges had evidence enough against the Esmeralda. They had believed Phoebus dead, and all was said.

Phoebus, for his part, had made no great flight. He had simply gone to rejoin his company, in garrison at Queue-en-Brie, in the Isle-de-France, a few stages from Paris.

After all, it agreed with him not at all to appear in person in that suit. He vaguely felt he would cut a ridiculous figure there. At bottom, he knew not too well what to think of the whole affair. Undevout and superstitious, as is every soldier who is nothing but a soldier, when he questioned himself upon this adventure, he was not reassured concerning the goat, concerning the bizarre fashion in which he had made acquaintance with the Esmeralda, concerning the no less strange manner in which she had let him guess her love, concerning her quality of Egyptian, finally concerning the surly monk. He foresaw in this story much more magic than love, probably a sorceress, perhaps the devil; a comedy, in short, or, to speak the language of that time, a very disagreeable mystery wherein he played a very awkward part, the part of blows and of mockery. The captain was quite abashed at it. He experienced that sort of shame which our La Fontaine has so admirably defined:

“Ashamed as a fox that a hen had caught.”[109]

“Stories of the world, in your language.”